The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 25

  Greck took the crumpled bills from his pocket and picked out the scrap of paper the old woman had given him. He placed it on the table and put the money back in his pocket. He was acutely conscious of the innkeeper’s gaze and looked up. There was no doubt about it now, the girl was smiling at him; there she stood, holding the green bottle, her fingers curved around a few loose cigarettes, little white sticks that matched her face. All he was aware of in the darkness were her startling white face, the dark mouth, and the piercingly white cigarettes in her hand. She gave a brief smile, then moved aside the curtain and left.

  The innkeeper was now gazing fixedly at Greck. His expression was stony, with something menacing about it. Greck was scared of him. That’s how murderers look, he thought, and he would have welcomed the chance to leave quickly. Outside, the calliope was droning away, the streetcar squealed past, and sadness filled him, an alien and solemn sadness. The repulsive apricots, soft and warm, lay in front of him on the table, and flies were sticking to his cup. He did not wave them away. All at once he got up and called, “The bill, please,” raising his voice to give himself courage. The innkeeper hurried over. Greck took some money from his pocket. He watched the flies now slowly gathering on the apricots, black sticky dots on that repulsive pink; the thought of having eaten them almost turned his stomach.

  “Three pengös,” said the innkeeper. Greck handed him the money. The innkeeper glanced at the schnapps glass, still half full, then at Greck’s chest, at the scrap of paper lying on the table, and he picked it up at the very instant Greck reached for it. The innkeeper grinned, his big fat pale face looked repulsive. The innkeeper read the address on the paper: it was his own. He grinned, more hideously than ever. Sweat broke out over Greck’s body again.

  “Do you still need this paper?” asked the innkeeper.

  “No,” said Greck. “Good-bye.” It occurred to him he had to say “Heil Hitler,” and in the doorway he added “Heil Hitler!” The innkeeper did not respond. Turning round, Greck saw the man toss the remains of the schnapps onto the floor. The apricots shone warm and pink, like rose-pink wounds in a dark body … Greck was glad to be out on the street, and he hurried off. He was ashamed to go back to the hospital before his leave was up, the cocky little lieutenant would laugh at him. But what he really wanted was to go back right now and lie down on his bed. He felt like having a decent meal, but when he actually thought of food he remembered the apricots, repulsively pink, and his nausea increased. He thought of the woman he had gone to at noon, straight from the hospital. Her mechanical kisses on his neck suddenly hurt, and he knew why he had found the apricots so repulsive: they were the same color as her underwear, she had sweated a bit, and her body had been warm. It was a stupid idea to go to a woman in the middle of the day in this heat. But he had been following the advice of his father, who had told him he must be sure and have a woman at least once a month. This woman hadn’t been bad, a sturdy little person who would probably have been delightful in the evening. She had taken the last of his money off him and known right away what he was up to as soon as she saw he was wearing two pairs of pants. She had laughed and given him the name of the Jewish tailor where he could sell them.

  He slowed down. He felt sick to his stomach. He knew it: he should have had a proper meal. Now it was too late, he wouldn’t be able to eat a thing. Everything disgusted him: the woman, the dirty Jew, even the swingboats, though that had been a novelty, but they disgusted him too, and the fruit, the innkeeper, the soldier—the lot. He had liked the girl. He had liked her very much. But it wouldn’t do to have a woman twice in one day. She had looked very lovely, standing there in the dark in that green corner with her white face, but close up she was sure to be sweaty and smelly too. These girls probably couldn’t help being sweaty, they didn’t have the money to smell nice in the middle of the day in this heat.

  He was passing a restaurant. Chairs stood on the street among tubs of stiff green plants. He sat down in a corner and ordered some soda water. “With ice,” he called after the waiter. The waiter nodded. A couple at the next table were talking Rumanian.

  Greck was now thirty-three and had been suffering from chronic indigestion ever since he was sixteen. Fortunately, his father was a doctor, not a good doctor but the only one in the small town, and they were reasonably well off. But his mother was thrifty. In the summer they used to go to health resorts, or south to the Alps, and often to the coast, and during the winter, when they stayed home, they ate poorly. The only time they ate well was when guests came, but they had few guests. In their small town the center for all social gatherings was the inn, and he was not allowed to go with his parents to the inn. When guests came, wine was served, but by the time he reached the age when he could have drunk wine, he was already suffering from chronic indigestion. They had always eaten a lot of potato salad. He didn’t know exactly how often it had actually been, whether three or four times a week, but some days he had the feeling that as a boy he had eaten nothing but potato salad. A doctor once told him, years later, that his symptoms almost bordered on those of malnutrition, and that potato salad was poison to his system.

  Word soon got around his hometown that he was sick, and indeed, you could see he was, and the girls more or less ignored him. His father wasn’t that well off, not enough to compensate for his ill health. In school he didn’t shine either. On finishing high school, in 1931, he was allowed to choose a graduation gift, and he chose a trip. He soon got off the train, in Hagen took a room in a hotel, and spent the evening feverishly roaming the town, but he couldn’t find a prostitute in Hagen, and left the next day for Frankfurt, where he stayed a week. At the end of a week he had run out of money and took the train home. On the train he thought he would die. At home he was received with shocked surprise; he had had enough money for a three-week trip. His father looked at him, his mother wept, and there was a terrible scene with his old man, who forced him to take off his clothes and be examined. It was a Saturday afternoon, he had never forgotten it; outside, all was quiet in those clean streets, so medieval and idyllic, warm and deep, the bells rang for a long, long time, and he stood facing his father and had to submit to having his body tapped by the old man’s fingers. In the surgery. He hated that fat face and the breath that always smelled slightly of beer, and he made up his mind to commit suicide. His father’s hands kept tapping his body, that gray head of thick hair moving for a long time below his chest. “You’re crazy,” said his father on finally raising his head, and he grinned softly. “You’re crazy. A woman once or twice a month is plenty for you.” He knew his old man was right.

  That evening he sat with Mama drinking weak tea. She didn’t say a word, but all at once she began to cry. He laid aside the newspaper and went to his room.

  Two weeks later he went to Marburg, to the university. He followed his father’s advice to the letter, much as he hated him. After five years he graduated in law. In 1937 he did his first tour of military duty, in 1938 his second, and in 1939, after he’d spent two years in the district attorney’s office, the war broke out, and he was sent to the front as a second lieutenant. He disliked the war. The war made new demands on him. It was no longer enough to be a qualified attorney, to have a good position with chances of promotion. Now they all looked at his chest when he came home. His chest was but meagerly decorated. In her letters Mama told him to take care of himself and at the same time made hints that felt like pinpricks.

  “The Beckers’ boy Hugo has been home on leave. He has the Iron Cross, First Class. Not bad for a boy who never got through high school, who couldn’t even make it as a butcher’s apprentice. I hear they’re even going to make him an officer. Sounds incredible to me. Wesendonk has been badly wounded, they say he’s going to lose his leg.” Even that was something, to lose a leg.

  He told the waiter to bring him some more soda water. The soda water made him feel better. It was ice-cold. He longed to be able to wipe out everything he had done, that silly business with the Jew, and that
stupid idea of buying a bit of fruit on a busy street with a hundred-pengö bill. The thought of that scene made him sweat again. Suddenly he felt his stomach beginning to rebel. He kept his seat and looked around for the toilet. Everyone in the restaurant was sitting quietly chatting. Not a soul moved. He looked anxiously around until his eyes fell on a green curtain beside the counter; he got slowly to his feet and walked stiffly toward the green curtain. On the way he had to salute, a captain was sitting there with a woman; his salute was brief and smart, and he was glad to reach the green curtain.

  By four o’clock he was already back at the hospital. The cocky little lieutenant was sitting there with his bags packed. He was wearing his black tank uniform, numerous decorations shone on his chest. Greck knew exactly which ones they were. There were five of them. The lieutenant was drinking wine and eating slices of bread and meat. He called to Greck as he entered, “Your barrack box has arrived.”

  “Good,” said Greck. He walked over to his bed and dragged the box by the handle over to the window.

  “By the way,” said the lieutenant, “they had to leave your battalion commander behind at Szokarhely. Schmitz stayed with him. He wasn’t fit to be moved, that captain of yours.”

  “Too bad,” said Greck. He began to open his box.

  “I’d leave it shut if I were you,” said the lieutenant, “we have to move on, the lot of us, you too.”

  “Me too?”

  “That’s right,” the lieutenant laughed, then his childlike face became solemn. “They’re soon going to be organizing stomach commandos.”

  Greck could feel his stomach protesting again. He breathed heavily at the sight of the meat lying there right in front of his eyes in all its clarity. Those gritty specks of fat in the canned meat looked to him like fly eggs. He walked rapidly to the window to get some air. Outside, a cart was driving by loaded with apricots. Greck vomited—he felt an incredible sense of relief.

  “Bon appétit!” cried the little lieutenant.

  V

  Feinhals had gone into town to buy pins, cardboard, and India ink, but all he had managed to get was the cardboard, deep-pink cardboard, the kind the sergeant major liked for making placards. On his way back from town, it started to rain. The rain was warm. Feinhals tried to push the thick roll under his tunic, but the roll was too long and too thick, and when he noticed the wrapping paper beginning to get wet at the edges and the pink of the cardboard coming through, he walked faster. At a street corner, he had to wait. Tanks were clumsily rounding the curve, slowly swinging first their gun barrels and then their rear ends as they continued on toward the southeast. People stood quietly watching the tanks. Feinhals walked on. The rain was coming down solidly now, dripping from the trees, and when he turned into the street leading to his clearing station, there were already large puddles on the black ground.

  On the door hung the big white sign on which he had printed in pale-red pencil: “Hospital Clearing Station—Szentgyörgy.” Soon a better sign would hang there, sturdy, deep pink, printed in script with India ink. Plain for all to see. At this hour there was no one about. Feinhals rang the bell, inside the porter pressed the switch for the latch; he nodded to the porter as he passed his little cubicle, and entered the corridor. In the corridor a machine pistol and a rifle were hanging on coat hooks. Beside each door was a little glass peephole with a thermometer hanging behind it. Everything was clean, and it was very peaceful, and Feinhals walked very quietly. Behind the first door he could hear the sergeant major on the telephone. In the corridor hung photographs of schoolmistresses and a large colored view of Szentgyörgy.

  Feinhals turned to the right, went out through a door, and was in the schoolyard. The schoolyard was surrounded by big trees, and beyond its walls clustered tall buildings. Feinhals looked at a window on the fourth floor: the window was open. He walked quickly back into the building and up the stairs.

  On the landings hung the photographs of former graduating classes. A whole row of big brown-and-gilt frames surrounding waist-length photos of girls: thick oval pieces of cardboard, each with a picture of a girl. The first frame showed the class of ’18; 1918 seemed to have been the first graduating year. The girls were wearing stiff white blouses and smiling sadly. Feinhals had looked at them often, every day for almost a week. Surrounded by the girls’ pictures was one of a very dark, severe-looking lady wearing pince-nez; she must be the headmistress. From 1918 to 1932 it was the same lady—in those fourteen years she did not seem to have changed. It was always the same photo; most likely she always took the same one to the photographer and had him stick it in the center. Feinhals paused in front of the class of ’28. Here his eyes were drawn to a girl because of her figure: her name was Maria Kartök, she wore her hair in bangs low on her forehead, almost to her eyebrows, and her face was confident and pretty. Feinhals smiled. He had now reached the second landing and walked on up to the class of ’32. He had also graduated in 1932. He looked at each girl in turn, they must have been nineteen at the time, his own age then, and now they were thirty-two: in this class there was another girl wearing bangs, only halfway down her forehead, and her face was confident and of a certain severe tenderness. Her name was Ilona Kartök and she was very like her sister, only she seemed slighter and less vain. The stiff blouse suited her well, and she was the only girl in the frame who was not smiling. Feinhals stood there for a few seconds, smiled again, and continued slowly on up to the fourth floor. He was sweating but had no free hand to take off his cap, so he walked on.

  At one end of the landing a statue of the Virgin Mary stood in a niche in the wall. It was made of plaster, a vase of fresh flowers had been placed in front of it; that morning there had been tulips in the vase, now there were yellow and red roses, tight, barely opened buds. Feinhals halted and looked along the corridor. Seen as a whole, that corridor full of girls’ pictures looked monotonous: all those girls looked like butterflies, innumerable butterflies with slightly darker heads, preserved and collected in large frames. It seemed to be always the same ones, only the large, dark, center one changed from time to time. It changed in 1932, in 1940, and in 1944. Way up on the left, at the end of the third landing, hung the year of ’44, girls in stiff white blouses, smiling and unhappy, and in the middle a dark elderly lady who was also smiling and also seemed unhappy. As he passed, Feinhals glanced at the year of ’42; there was a Kartök in that one too, called Szorna, but there was nothing striking about her: she wore her hair like all the others, her face was round and touching. When he got to the top, to the corridor that was as silent as the rest of the house, he heard trucks driving up outside. He threw his stuff on the windowsill, opened a window, and looked out. The sergeant major was standing down on the street facing a column of trucks, their motors still running. Soldiers with bandages jumped down onto the road, and at the rear, from a large red furniture van, came a whole group of soldiers with their packs. The street quickly filled up. The sergeant major shouted, “Here—over here—everyone into the corridor—and wait there.” A straggling gray procession moved slowly in through the doors. Across the street, windows were flung open, heads looked out, and people gathered at the corner.

  Some of the women were crying.

  Feinhals shut the window. The building was still quiet—the first sounds were just rising faintly from the corridor below; he walked slowly to the end of the corridor, where he kicked once at a door, and a woman’s voice inside said, “Yes?” He felt himself blushing as he pressed down the latch with his elbow. He did not see her right away; the room was full of stuffed animals, wide shelves held rolled maps, and neatly galvanized glass-topped cases displaying rock specimens, and on the wall hung a colored print of embroidery samples and a numbered series of illustrations showing all the stages of infant care.

  “Hello there,” cried Feinhals.

  “Yes?” she called. He went toward the window where a narrow aisle opened up between cabinets and map stands. She was sitting at a little table. Her face was rounder than d
ownstairs in the picture, the severity seemed to have grown softer and the tenderness more pronounced. She was shy yet amused when he said “Good afternoon,” and she nodded to him. He threw the big paper roll on the windowsill, then the parcel he had been carrying in his left hand, tossed his cap down beside them, and wiped the sweat off his face.

  “I need your help, Ilona,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you could let me have some India ink.”

  She stood up, closing the book lying in front of her.

  “India ink,” she said. “India ink, I don’t know what that is.”

  “I thought you were a teacher!”

  She laughed.

  “India ink,” he said, “is a kind of drawing ink. Well, then—d’you know what a lettering pen is?”

  “I can imagine,” she said with a smile. “A pen for writing fancy lettering—yes, I know what that is.”

  “D’you think you could lend me one?”

  “I believe so.” She gestured toward the cupboard behind him, but he saw that she would never come out from the corner behind the table.

  He had discovered her three days earlier in this room and had spent hours with her every day, but she had never come close: she seemed scared of him. She was very devout, very innocent and intelligent, he had already had long talks with her, and he could feel that she was drawn to him—but she had never come close, close enough for him to suddenly put his arms around her and kiss her. He had had long talks with her, hung around her for hours, and a few times they had discussed religion, but he would have liked to kiss her; only she never came close.

  He frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “Just one word,” he said hoarsely. “You’ve only to say one word, and I’ll never come into your room again.”